Heart of Seven
by annaisadinosaur
Summary: A boy that split his soul hid a secret in each shard. Seven kisses, seven horcruxes, and an underlying truth that Tom Riddle spent his whole life suffocating.


**seven**

He can feel the surge of fire returning as it consumes his mind and blinds his thoughts. The power ignites, sparks in his veins, and he closes his eyes as the dark takes him into its depths once more.

But it is a welcoming dark, a dark where the demons are his own and rise with him rather than against. The creature, his very favorite and most cherished demon, slithers across his lap as he basks in the twisted elation of death and anguish and cries beneath his feet. His nails scrape the scales of his demon with dark affection.

And she wraps himself around him, crawling up to his shoulders and wringing herself around the marble skin of his neck, where she can feel the beat of his caged heart that has drowned in a sea of ebony.

"Nagini..." Her name leaves his mouth as a hiss, and his thoughts that pound are hers, as she is his and her skin has been imbedded with a shard of his soul. "They doubted us. They dared to think we were gone..."

And the scales of her body slide past his thin, lifeless lips, and he ventures to think that this veneration in his limbs will only escalate with time.

"Our power only grows, Nagini... It only grows..."

And he is enveloped in it. He kisses her skin, the animal that is so much himself as she is her own. She is alive with his supremacy. She is the ink that spreads throughout his throne, oozing like poison, lighting him like a flame and overwhelming him in an intoxicating wrath.

She is his power.

**six**

The breath that leaves his lips that night surrounds him in a mist, but he does not crave company, only one thing: a life. There is nothing that he needs. Nothing at all, except for the sterling death of one boy.

Behind this living, breathing child is what he's craved all along. And he will have it at his fingertips.

His anticipation soars and cries and slithers like the snakes of his soul and with an expulsion of his lungs he releases it onto the innocence of the boy. His curse leaps throughout the still of the air and when it falls onto the pallor of the Potter boy's skin, the Dark Lord almost smiles.

But it is when he glimpses his longing that it is stolen away into the oblivion of the dusk. The green of his curse rebounds in his eyes and screams fill him to the core; whether they are his, he does not know. He sees it in the child's eyes, the green, and it is everything and it is everywhere.

His strength is sapped from him and he is nothing. The loss is a roar in his ears and he is powerless to the arms of Death that find him and wrap him in their suffocating grip.

_Powerless_. It would not end this way. It could not.

He slithers against his enemy, staring with dead eyes, and brushes his cursed lips against the cold and unforgiving face of Death.

Death is not expecting it, and it is the only glimpse of life the Dark Lord sees; he grasps it and falls headfirst, stumbling and escaping into a nebulous night, leaving nothing behind but his reign. He leaves it with the green eyes.

**five**

He has built a throne for himself and here is the peak, the excellence, the sick perfection. A Lord split five ways, a superiority impeccable and indestructible. He is made of titanium and he will not fall.

He pulls the epitome of his glory to him, this woman, this dutiful servant that follows him like a lap dog. And he knows this and gladly takes advantage of it. Bellatrix's skin is chilling and smooth against his palms, and vaguely he remembers the metal of the locket and how his own pounding heart felt in his hand.

She is the locket, he tells himself. She is the lust he stows beneath his skin and she is the sparkling Slytherin serpent that whispers desire and pent up passion. His mouth meets her and he wants to devour her soul as his own.

He will have her heart. She will let him have it.

**four**

He is not naïve. They call him Tom, but they do not know the truth. Not yet. He will make them scream it in time, when they are at his feet. Voldemort will be the essence of their fears. His is the face they will dread in their sleep; he is the nightmare that will leave them restless and waking in sweat.

They do not know what he has done. What he has accomplished. They do not see it, even though the aura of his throne already emanates around him. They do not see it, because they are naïve. They are weak, and he is powerful.

They do not know of the Diadem or what it may contain. They do not hear its whispers late in the night, confessing what they call evil. They do not see the atrocities that fuel him along this black path. They do not see anything.

But he is accomplished, he is triumphant, and even Ravenclaw with all of her wit and wisdom will bow at his feet. He knows it.

He greets the Albanian girl he has spoken with on occasion with a grin that charms her foolish soul. He thinks of his own, the part that lies within the Diadem, and he relishes in the fact that he has outsmarted the most renowned minds of all history.

He knows it, and he proves it in the way he pulls the Albanian girl to him. He kisses her roughly, hungrily, consuming every bit of her as he can, and somewhere beyond the reach of his mentality, he hears her giggle.

That is the end. He drowns her in the starless black of his might.

**three**

Tom's mind is a war. He knows what he wants, and his desire is outlined in his mind. Vague, but it is there, and sometimes, when he is suspended in his own dreams, he can feel it.

He will have it. But when? And more importantly, how? At what cost?

At no cost, certainly. He is higher than the rest, and costs do not apply to Tom.

He smirks, meeting gazes with his companion, a Slytherin girl in his year named Helen. She is friendly, and she is beautiful, but he cares little about either. Instead, he explores the idea of having her, her, all to himself, and a portion of his longing is suddenly her, suddenly the feel of her, suddenly the taste of her, the taste of power and victory...

He has written about her, in late nights after abandoning his studies, in the small, leather bound black book. This is where his soul has gone, where his thoughts have been poured, where he has fantasized Helen's death.

She smiles at him. It is simple, but he stares her, anticipating, and she does not disappoint. She answers his longing immediately; she brushes her lips against his, a kiss that lasts momentarily and is gone within an instant.

But it is all he needs to know that her blood will be his.

**two**

There is a cup, a glimmering, jeweled cup, somewhere far off into the distance, in a land that Tom has never dreamed of or seen. He does not know the cup exists, but the cup shall belong to a part of his soul, and it will be his.

He is, for now, only aware of the song of children that surrounds and suffocates him. He does not belong, and he does not care to. They do not like him.

But there she is, Mary Anne, the tiresome blonde head of hair that skips far too often and speaks much too loudly. But she prances over to Tom despite the fact that no one likes him as he's sitting alone at the playground. She crouches down to line up her eyesight with his.

"Tom, aren't you ever _lonely_?"

He shifts backwards from her, uncomfortable with her proximity. "Lonely? No. Why would I be lonely?"

"I don't know. But I thought you looked lonely. So, don't be lonely." And then she leans in and pushes her mouth against his, closing her eyes and holding her face against his skin. Tom's arms stiffen and he stares with his eyes wide open. He realizes only moments later that she is kissing him, the kind of thing he saw married grown-ups do sometimes, and it is all much too odd. But it doesn't hurt, and he wouldn't mind Mary Anne's affection. He's special, isn't he? Being kissed like a married grown-up? He supposes it wouldn't hurt to close his eyes, too, and so he does so.

She pulls away from him, a giggle running through the air that would never leave his mind as long as he lived. And then she waved her fingers and pranced just like she'd come, leaving Tom sitting on the ground, struck silent and uncomprehending. Only within a span of a few moments did she draw another boy near and kiss him just as she'd kissed Tom.

Special...

There is a spark that lights somewhere deep within him, and he doesn't know why or how it has arrived to him, but the anger expels from his chest in a flame that lights the playground alive in violent, billowing orange flames.

Screams ring through the air, far higher than Mary Anne's giggle, and the innocence that had once been Tom Riddle finds itself in the harmless jeweled Hufflepuff cup, somewhere in that far, distant horizon.

Mary Anne had been caught in the fire. He heard the caretakers cry her name, try to rescue her from its wrath, but it was too late.

She had burned alive.

**one**

Tom Riddle does not remember it, but it is where it all begins, the murder and suffocation of what feigned idea had brought him into the world. It is his mother's feigned idea that would someday be captured in her father's ring, a bit of Tom's soul that he would disregard and keep safely away so the world would not know him as he was.

It was far more evil than even Tom could touch, and it was at its purest the night the poor woman lay him on the step and kissed him good-bye.

He would forever hide it in the objects that reminded him far too greatly of his weakness. Of his only enemy aside from Death.

He did not love, but at that short moment in time, that brush of his mother's lips against his untainted skin, he was loved.

* * *

_A/N: I tried, and therefore no one should criticize me! Heh, well, hope this wasn't TOO terrible. I don't know how I feel about it at the moment. Written for the Seven Kisses Challenge on HPFC with my chosen character (guess who?) Tom Riddle. (Yeah, wasn't too far-fetched of a guess, I suppose.) I was going for a certain style here, but I think it dive-bombed. Sigh. Well, that's that._

_Reviews are much appreciated! _


End file.
